Sofia Piñero – The Ace!

Sofia Piñero was an extraordinarily bright child growing up the daughter of a police officer in Puerto Rico! She is one of those people who, for whatever reason, are just ultra-intelligent. She graduated high school early and finished her Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University at age 22. She’s currently working on her PhD in Physics and her thesis relates to electromagnetism and anti-gravity.
Although she’s got a fantastic body and works to keep it spectacular, for several reasons she usually dresses with the intent to play down her attributes when in public. First, as an accelerated learner, she was in class with people older than her through primary and secondary school and had a difficult social life as she was younger, gawkier, and a brainiac who was occasionally teased and usually not invited to social functions. As a young girl, this gave her a complex about her attractiveness. While, as a young adult, she is intellectually aware of her beauty, she still lacks inner confidence in that regard. Second, an off-shoot of the first, is her shyness and difficulty socializing in group situations which makes her something of a wallflower. Third, also an offshoot of the first, she’s modest about herself and her accomplishments because she doesn’t want to come across as thinking she’s better than her peers which is a complaint that was often unfairly lodged against her growing up. Finally, due to her recent crimefighting career, she finds it useful to dress in a way that people would not believe she is the bombshell superhero.
Sofia has not decided to become a crimefighter because of any personal tragedy or horrible experience. Rather, the general reason is that as an engineer and a physicist she believes in an ordered environment and societal order and the need for preventing behavior which goes against the rules and causes havoc with the way things “should” be. Due to her inherent intelligence and creativity, and because of her skills learned as an engineer and physicist, she has designed a breakthrough device which operates using principles of magnetism and anti-gravity to create a force field around her body. The effect of the force-field is many-fold: The speed of force directed against her is slowed by the force-field to no more than approximately 25 miles an hour on impact. An example of the result is that bullets might leave a small bruise but are not traveling at sufficient speed to penetrate her skin. Other force directed against her is similarly effected which makes her difficult for anybody to overpower by fists or projectiles.
The force-field also has a reverse effect. The power of her blows is increased because of the force-field repelling her target. A curious side effect of the repelling nature of her invention is that she can, exponentially, run faster and jump higher because of the increased repelling force against the ground. Her landings after jumping are also softened due to the nature of the force-field being emitted. Sofia has kept her invention a secret and does not even hint at its creation in her thesis which covers collateral theorems.
She’s invented many things before. Indeed, she sold a past invention, when she was an engineering student, to a major company and that has provided her with a nice nest egg on which to live while she continues to be a student. She owns the house where she lives off-campus and rents out rooms to three other college students. However, they do not know she is the landlord as she’s set up a dummy corporation to collect rent and handle maintenance. Her younger roommates believe she is just another tenant who has the largest part of the house because she’s been there the longest. She has roommates even though she doesn’t need the money because she doesn’t want people to know she doesn’t need the money, and she hides the fact that she’s the landlord for the same reason and to be “one of the guys,” as well as due to her innate modesty. However, despite wanting to be “one of the guys,” she never finds time to socialize with her roommates (especially now with the crimefighting), and very few have come to feel they really “know” her with some feeling she’s aloof and stuck-up, the same issue she had when she was younger.
The direct reason for her donning a superhero costume of her own design was the combination of wanting to field test her force-field invention in anonymity and happening upon an internet chatroom where she realized that some members were speaking in code and were actually part of a criminal organization. Her curiosity, sense of right and wrong, and desire to use her invention in a practical way, led her to create a costume and crash the clandestine meeting.
Unlike her normal attire, Sofia’s costume emphasizes her body while keeping her identity secret. Her alter ego is Sofia’s opportunity to be proud of who she is, what she stands for, and how she looks. Thus, the costume is very low-cut, skimpy and stylish. However, Sofia has not been completely impractical. She used a heavier-duty (although still lightweight and stretchable) fabric which she chemically treated to reinforce and give her additional force-stopping capability and she also engineered in extra support where needed. She placed her force-field invention in the metal bracelets she wears on each wrist to protect it from being damaged and, when activated, it protects her entire body. The closer the bracelets are to each other, the greater effect and for maximum stoppage they should be centered close to her frame.
Her first crimefighting foray was a smashing success. The drug-dealing hoods were taken by surprise that anybody else was around for the transfer of their shipment and those that got off a shot before she punched their lights out were stupefied to see the bullets bounce harmlessly off of her. She tied them up with their shipment and called the police.
After a couple of more forays with equal success, she’s starting to gain some confidence although she has made only a small dent in a large criminal enterprise. So far, besides drugs, she broke up a shipment of stolen art, illegal immigrant smuggling, and an old-fashioned sports bookie. The variety of the crimes gave a hint at the size of the organization, but the thugs she had taken down were all clearly small-time and low-level. The tale they tell in lock-up has the police chuckling, but so far the news media has not picked up on her activities.
However, despite her intelligence, Sofia is still young, inexperienced, and not very worldly. So far this is almost a game to her. She gets to make quips like the action heroes in TV and movies and it’s quite fun. The very real dangers she faces haven’t really been brought home to her personally yet. The crimefighting thing could almost be seen as a confidence-building lark. As her adventures begin to be chronicled in the pages of VaVaVaVoom! Issues 1 and 2, she will begin to understand the threats she is now facing!

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